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Lynda Barry visits William & Mary for the 3rd annual Arts & Sciences Open Inquiry Speaker Series
What is an image?
In February, Lynda Barry presented her keynote address The Unthinkable Mind: Art in Ordinary Human Experience. She centered her talk around that simple question. As a creative who works with several different mediums, Barry uses the idea of an image to ground her work.
Barry was first asked “What is an image?” by an influential college professor, explaining that to understand an image is to give it form.
“Whether I'm writing or drawing or teaching or giving a talk, there is a central core, that I can only call an image. It's that living thing that's contained by anything we call the arts. It's about a basic human ability to express something. And the arts are usually the form that it takes,” said Barry.
With an image in mind, Barry approaches each medium she works with similarly. As a cartoonist, Barry cannot separate her written and visual work entirely from each other.
“I think a lot of people, if you don't make comics, you can get this idea that you write the comic first and then you just draw the pictures that go with it. But in fact, for most people I know and certainly for me, they arrive at the exact same time. Say I'm drawing a character and drawing their eyes, but my pen slips and one of the eyebrows points down, so suddenly this character looks angry. Suddenly, what I think she's saying changes just because of that slip of the eyebrow. So, for me, I can't really split them apart,” said Barry.
As part of her visit to W&M, Barry also hosted a faculty workshop. She led the faculty through a series of different drawing exercises, such as drawing an animal with their eyes closed and drawing a cartoon character from memory in 45 seconds.
The workshop focused on guiding faculty members on how to bring comics into the classroom as a transformative practice.
Caitlin McGill, Associate Teaching Professor of English, was inspired by the creative nature of Barry’s teaching style and how it connects to her own classroom practices.
"Participating in her faculty workshop was an incredible learning opportunity for many reasons. First, we got to be her students for 90 minutes—students prompted to quiet the questions like ‘Is this good? Does this suck?’ and to fall into the spell of play and discovery.”
“In my creative writing workshops at William & Mary, I often invite students to begin a writing session by closing their eyes or looking away from the paper in front of them, and simply letting their pen move around on the page in random shapes. After one minute, I invite students to show the image they've just created, and to reflect on what they see,” said McGill. “But Lynda taught me the power of immediately asking the whole class to hold up their drawings at the same time. She taught me that when we do this, we have less time to second-guess ourselves, and we get to see our peers' excited, impressed reactions to each other's creations."
Barry encourages her students to abandon their preconceived ideas about their own creative limitations.
“What I'm most interested in is people who love to write, who wish they could draw, and showing them that they absolutely can if they're willing to make comics. Comics are a different kind of drawing," said Barry.
The intention behind the Open Inquiry Speaker Series is to connect the W&M community with broad perspectives and shared values. Inclusivity has always been an integral part of Barry’s work.
“Well, it's everything to me. For example, in my classes at the University of Wisconsin Madison, I work really hard to get not just a variety of students with different kinds of backgrounds, but different disciplines. And I also work hard to get sophomores studying right next to doctoral students,” said Barry. “The more I mix the class up like that, the richer the work is. And that's kind of an evolutionary fact. Diversity is critical, particularly in the natural world.”
Barry’s visit to W&M serves as a reminder that creativity is within reach for everyone. As the university concluded the Year of the Arts, the commitment to innovation and imagination remains strong. William & Mary continues to foster a culture of acceptance and growth where voices like Barry’s inspire learning both in the classroom and beyond.